Although it is difficult for sellers to clearly understand the performance of each potential competitor, they can use some tools for analysis, such as the free online tools Similar Web and SEMrush mentioned above. They can provide a lot of additional detailed information about potential competitors, including traffic overview, traffic location, reference websites, search keywords (natural search and paid search), social recommendations, etc.
Using these tools, sellers can basically understand the information of competitors so that sellers can make correct judgments about their decisions.
In addition to the methods described above, sellers can also analyze competitors in the following three ways.
(1) Check the company’s operating years.
If a company does not make money, it will generally not operate for too long. Sellers can use the Who is tool to check the company’s domain name information and see when the company was registered. In addition, Twitter and Facebook will display the creation date of the account. Understanding the operating time of a company can better help sellers understand its success factors.
In the query results, you can see that the registration time of the website domain name is April 22, 2010.
However, the domain name registration date does not necessarily represent the company’s founding date. It is possible that the domain name was registered a long time ago or was purchased from other channels.
Sellers can also use the WaybackMachine website time travel tool, which can “travel” through the Internet to find a website’s historical archives.
(2) Understand the attention and interaction information of competitors on social media.
The attention and interaction information of competitors on social media is not necessarily related to sales, but understanding this information helps to better understand competitors. It should be noted that the number of followers displayed by the store is not necessarily the real number of fans. Some of them may be “zombie fans.” Therefore, sellers must understand how much attention and interaction competitors’ posts can actually get.
For example, the number of followers of a company’s account on Facebook and Twitter is shown in Figures 9-18 and 9-19. From the information shown in the figure, the company seems to have a strong popularity. However, all the posts updated by the company’s account have almost no interaction with fans. At most, a post only receives one or two “likes/collections”.
Sellers can also use the StatusPeople tool to review the “zombie fans” of Twitter accounts, which can better understand the number of real fans. For example, looking at the account mentioned above, you can see that 63% of them are “zombie fans.”
When investigating competitors’ social accounts, pay special attention to the following points:
●What platforms do competitors use?
●How often do competitors interact with customers?
●How do competitors communicate with customers?
(3) Check traffic and backlinks.
Traffic and backlinks are indicators of the seller’s overall competitive strength. Although sellers may not be able to obtain the exact traffic of a specific website, there are tools that can help sellers measure the approximate traffic of the website and the number of backlinks pointing to that traffic.
SEMrush and Similar Web are excellent tools for viewing competitors’ traffic, traffic sources, and backlinks. For example, the number of visits to an online store and its backlinks can be found in Figure 9-21 through the above tool. This online store gets nearly 1,000,000 visits per month and has more than 500 backlinks pointing to it.
Of course, many service tool software can only query the traffic of established websites. If you want to find website information of relatively new competitors, you may need to find other channels.